


The Hue and Cry

by Garonne



Category: Mой нежно любимый детектив | My Dearly Beloved Detective (1986), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/F, Gen, hints of femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 07:21:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7257970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garonne/pseuds/Garonne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An evening at home with a stack of newspapers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hue and Cry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [k_e_p](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=k_e_p).



> This is based on the film My Dearly Beloved Detective, in which Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are fictional characters, but so many people came to Baker Street to seek their help that it was deemed necessary to install a pair of consulting detectives at the address -- and the best candidates for the job were two women named Shirley Holmes and Jane Watson.
> 
> This story takes place some time before the film.
> 
> Most of the newspaper extracts are real.
> 
> Many thanks to sanguinity for beta-reading!

.. .. ..

Jane let out a sudden laugh and pushed a newspaper under my nose.

"Look at this one, Shirley."

She was pointing at the Exchange and Mart column. I read:

_Offered, a clockwork drummer boy and a toy trumpet. Wanted, any sensible, improving children's toys such as books, zoetropes, kaleidoscopes etc. for a nine-year-old boy._

I raised an eyebrow.

"Some poor tearaway is going to have a rather dull time of it from now on."

We were spending a productive evening at home, bringing our index of useful information up-to-date. Stacked on the table between us were the file boxes Mr Green had carried through from the lumber-room, and scattered around them lay reams of foolscap, pairs of scissors and bottles of paste. We each had a stack of newspapers at our elbow, almost four weeks' worth in total. We had been so busy this month, what with one case and another, that we'd fallen shamefully behind.

Jane was working on the Morning Post and already had a pile of clipped-out articles. I watched her at work, her lower lip caught between her teeth as she spread just the right thickness of glue on the back of an article. She was wearing a new green dress with a row of little mother-of-pearl buttons around the collar that glinted in the light whenever she moved.

She looked up and caught my eye.

"Daydreaming, Shirley?"

I frowned and returned to the London Illustrated News. It was not my favourite periodical. The crime reports were inaccurate, and the other articles gloried in a sensationalism beaten only by the Illustrated Police News. Moreover, it had a tendency to rely on the 'Amazing facts you should know' columns so beloved of newspaper editors with space to fill. I turned directly to the agony columns, the only really interesting part of the paper.

By the time Mr Green came in with tea, I had finished that week's copy and was turning to the next. He left the tray on the table and went away again. I poured for both of us and handed Jane a cup.

She seemed to have been captivated by an advertisements page. Upside-down, I read that the Cambden Linen Warehouse proposed 'Marriage and Outfitting Orders', with a sample trousseau apparently costing twenty pounds. A tiny flicker of alarm ran through me before I could suppress it. I had not thought her to have any serious 'follower' just now. Could it be one of her previous gentleman admirers, once banished but now readmitted to her good graces? Was it the well-to-do barrister of Lincoln's Inn, the ginger Welshman, or the young doctor with the King Charles spaniel? 

I cleared my throat.

"Let me recommend you an article, Jane."

She looked up. I pointed to the page in front of me.

"This is sure to be of interest to you. The London Illustrated News encourages its readers to take up ornamental screen-making, 'a past-time that combines usefulness and elegance, will conveniently fill up a long evening, and entails no mental exertion.'"

Her eyes narrowed.

"Why should that interest me?" she said in a voice that made clear she already knew perfectly well what I meant. 

"It is the fate that awaits every married woman, after all," I said with a shrug. "Or at least, every woman with a sufficiently wealthy husband. Evenings filled with 'fancy-work' in a desperate search for something to occupy herself. Endless antimacassars and Berlin-woolwork furniture covers, and churning out more embroidered tobacco pouches and slippers than one man can reasonably use."

It was not the first time I had aired my views on the subject, as any outside observer could clearly have seen from the set of Jane's jaw. 

"Pass the eyelet punch, please, Shirley," she said crisply.

I watched her punch out a series of holes in her pages with rather more force than was necessary.

I knew she entertained notions of marrying a man with progressive ideas, one who would not object to her occasionally collaborating with me. Those were in extremely short supply, however.

I returned to work. After the final copy of the Illustrated News, it was a pleasure to turn to the Police Gazette, the one periodical I always kept up with no matter how busy I was. I never cut clippings from this one, because every word of every page had the potential to be useful. My task now was simply a matter of separating out the last few weeks' supplements for filing under the appropriate categories: crimes committed, convicts on license, wanted aliens and so on.

It was some time before I glanced up at Jane again. She was staring at the horse-racing pages. At her elbow was a sheet of paper on which she seemed to have made some rough sketches. After a moment she jumped up and went to the bookshelves.

"Shirley," she said, coming back to the table with a map of Middlesex and Surrey. "You remember that case last month with the scraps of paper?"

She could only be referring to the body of a young man found near Waterloo Station on the morning of February 24th. He was still unidentified, three weeks later, and the police had made no progress on the case. Inspector Greeves had called on me discreetly to solicit my help and had shown me the only clues they had to go on: a few scraps of papers found in the man's pocket. One of them bore a scrawled inscription that resembled a name and address:  
_Little Charlie Evans_  
Connaught St. 411  
The other paper was a rough sketch map which couldn't be matched to any of the streets north of Hyde Park within a large radius of Connaught Street. The occupants of 411 Connaught Street itself firmly denied knowing anything about the matter, or anyone by the name of Charles Evans. The puzzle was an intriguing one, but I had been forced to declare myself as stumped as Greeves.

"The Charlie Evans case, you mean," I said now.

Jane was grinning at me, triumphant.

"There is no Charlie Evans. Shirley, Little Charlie is a horse!" She turned back to the racing pages. "Listen to these two horses running at Kempton Park on February 24th. Connaught Star, 4/1 odds. Little Charlie, evens."

She looked back up at me, glowing with excitement, and I had to smile back.

"And Waterloo is the station for Kempton Park," I said.

"Yes! And look at this. Do you accept this to be a good likeness of the sketch map Inspector Greeves showed us?"

She was holding up the sheet of paper, and I nodded. Her memory was as good as mine.

"And now look at this."

She had folded the Ordnance Survey map to show Kempton Park Racecourse and the neighbouring town of Sunbury-on-Thames, and she held it next to her drawing. It was obvious now which two lines on the rough sketch were supposed to represent the river Thames, and which square was the railway station. And the large cross on the sketch map --

"It's a house on Lower Hampton Road," Jane said.

We both stared at each other, and then burst out laughing.

"Little Charlie Evans," I said. "Oh dear, oh dear. How much time have the police spent looking for him?"

I rang for Mr Green, and Jane took a telegraph form from the desk drawer and began to fill it out.

"A wire for Scotland Yard, please, Mr Green," she said as soon as he appeared, still busy writing.

"What a loss to the science of deduction she will be," I thought as I watched her at work. And, though I would scarcely admit it even in the privacy of my own head, a still greater loss to me personally.

I had decided long ago she would never discover just how much I would miss her when I -- as was inevitable -- lost her. That day would be a long way into the future, I hoped.

"Jane," I said after Mr Green had left with the telegraph form. "That was very well done."

A hint of pink crept into her cheeks.

"It was, wasn't it?"

I bent to kiss the top of her head. "Very well done indeed," I murmured, before straightening and adding briskly, "Now back to work. We still each have a stack two inches thick to clear before supper."


End file.
